Berkeley filmmaker pays tribute to Toshiro Mifune

Mifune (right) and director Akira Kurosawa, his frequent collaborator, on the set of “Red Beard” (1965), as seen in “Mifune: The Last Samurai.”

Mifune (right) and director Akira Kurosawa, his frequent collaborator, on the set of “Red Beard” (1965), as seen in “Mifune: The Last Samurai.”

Photo: Strand Releasing

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Actor Toshiro Mifune (left) in Hiroshi Inagaki’s “Samurai Trilogy” in a scene from Steven Okazaki’s documentary “Mifune: The Last Samurai.”

Actor Toshiro Mifune (left) in Hiroshi Inagaki’s “Samurai Trilogy” in a scene from Steven Okazaki’s documentary “Mifune: The Last Samurai.”

Photo: Strand Releasing

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Actor Toshiro Mifune (left) in Akira Kurosawa's "Rashomon" in a scene from Steven Okazaki's documentary "Mifune" The Last Samurai."

Actor Toshiro Mifune (left) in Akira Kurosawa's "Rashomon" in a scene from Steven Okazaki's documentary "Mifune" The Last Samurai."

Photo: Strand Releasing

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Filmmaker Steven Okazaki’s “Mifune: The Last Samurai” looks at the life and career of noted Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune.

Filmmaker Steven Okazaki’s “Mifune: The Last Samurai” looks at the life and career of noted Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune.

Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle

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Filmmaker Steven Okazaki views the life and career of Toshiro Mifune in “Mifune: The Last Samurai.”

Filmmaker Steven Okazaki views the life and career of Toshiro Mifune in “Mifune: The Last Samurai.”

Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle

Berkeley filmmaker pays tribute to Toshiro Mifune

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As a boy growing up in Southern California in the 1960s, Steven Okazaki played cowboys with his friends in his Venice neighborhood.

Then he went to a movie screening that would change his life. The film, shown in 16mm at a Japanese community center in Venice, was Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai,” starring Japan’s John Wayne, Toshiro Mifune.

“I remember it vividly,” Okazaki recalled in his Berkeley office. “The projection was so bad, and they had these seats that were so uncomfortable to sit in, and they used a king-sized bedsheet as the screen. Every time someone would open the door, the screen would (flutter) and everyone would go, ‘Close the door!’

“I remember watching the last battle scene in the rain, and I was really captured by that. I’d never seen anything like that — that intensity, that drama.

“That’s when I asked my mom when she was in Little Tokyo to get me a samurai sword. That’s when we switched from playing cowboys to playing samurai in the neighborhood.”

Mifune’s visceral performance as a farmer-turned-samurai to protect a defenseless village always stuck with Okazaki, even after he moved to the Bay Area and became an Oscar-winning independent filmmaker. Now he is paying tribute to his idol by introducing him to a new generation with his documentary “Mifune: The Last Samurai.”

As it must, the documentary focuses on Mifune’s extraordinary collaboration with director Kurosawa, with whom he made 16 films during an 18-year period, including films such as “Rashomon” and “Seven Samurai” that are among the cornerstones of world cinema.

Such is the power of Mifune that Okazaki was able to lure such movie heavyweights as Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese for sit-downs to talk about Mifune’s impact, and Keanu Reeves to do the narration.

He also was able to track down several of Mifune’s co-stars, family and friends to chat about their memories of the actor still revered in Japan nearly 20 years after his death.

“When you said the name Mifune, eyes kind of lit up,” Okazaki said. “You could see it was special to them, not just remembering Mifune, but that time when they were all working together and felt part of this special thing.”

He even scored a coup in getting Kyoko Kagawa, one of the great actresses during Japan’s golden age of cinema in the 1950s, to talk about her former co-star and friend. (Kagawa, frankly, merits her own documentary.)

“I was knocked out by her,” Okazaki said. “She was so gracious and just had an amazing career. She was in three of my top 10 favorite films” — Yasujiro Ozu’s “Tokyo Story,” Kenji Mizoguchi’s “Sansho the Bailiff” and the Kurosawa-Mifune collaboration “Red Beard.”

Now 64, Okazaki is coming full circle from decades earlier when his mother, a supermarket worker, took him to samurai films at Japanese studio Toho’s L.A. theater.

Since then, Okazaki has forged his own successful movie career. After attending San Francisco State film school, he moved to Berkeley and began making documentaries and independent films. His 1987 San Francisco-shot indie “Living on Tokyo Time” premiered at Sundance and had a successful, albeit small, art house release.

He often made documentaries about the Japanese American experience, winning an Academy Award for his short “Days of Waiting: The Life & Art of Estelle Ishigo” (1990), and an Emmy in 2008 for the HBO documentary “White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” The latter is part of a two-decade relationship with HBO, which includes last year’s documentary “Heroin: Cape Cod, U.S.A.”

Okazaki is part of a wave of independent Asian American filmmakers — many of them in the Bay Area — who came of age in the latter part of the 20th century and have fostered a positive shift in national perception about Asian American experience.

And for Okazaki, some of that urge for change began when he saw a larger-than-life figure named Toshiro Mifune projected onto a bedsheet at a local community center.

“Back then, there were two standout Asian characters on American TV: Hop Sing in ‘Bonanza’ and the maid in ‘The Courtship of Eddie’s Father,’” said Okazaki, referring to Victor Sen Yung’s cook for the Cartwright family and Miyoshi Umeki’s servant to widower Bill Bixby and his son.

“Mifune was nothing like that. He had dignity. He wasn’t that sad, passive Asian character. I think that stood out for a lot of us.”

Mifune also helped change Japanese perceptions about themselves.

“If you look at Japanese films of that era, he’s pretty unique as that type of character — that rebel, that loner, that kind of brashness and crudity, it’s unique,” Okazaki said. “The samurai is really a guilty pleasure of Japanese society. He’s a figure of individuality, someone who stands up to authority. He’s like the opposite of what Japanese are always told — the nail that sticks up gets pounded down.